Interlude:

Human Sexuality

Here we go. You're probably not going to like this, and so I'm going to ask you to forgive me if I approach the subject gradually. Let me start out by saying that I'm not going to be dragging religion into this, or doing anything but logic; but if there's ever a subject that people don't want to be logical about, it's sex.

First, let's take a look at Bill and Monica there in the Oval Office. She's servicing him, and asking him when he's going to do it to her, and he says that in the situation he's in, he can't, and he hopes she'll understand, and wait for the millennium.

Now what does this imply? First of all, his sexual urges are being satisfied, but hers aren't. Her sexual desires are probably being aroused, but any satisfaction she gets is either self-induced or is the satisfaction of knowing that you've pleasured someone you care about.

Is it any wonder that the slang term for a dupe--someone who's being taken advantage of--is a "sucker"? Where do you think the term came from? And consider another slang expression: When a person finds out that something he thought would be nice is the opposite, he says, "That sucks!"

You see? We know. But we follow the Third New Commandment and are "tolerant," and so we refuse to admit to ourselves what we know. Sure, he made a sucker out of her--in every sense of the word. But, hey, if she's willing, what's the problem? She's an adult.

So there's nothing wrong with it because she was willing. Then what about the widow who's handed over her life savings to "that nice investment broker," who had some reverses in the stock downturn, poor man, and lost everything? She gave her money to him willingly, didn't she? And he's such a nice young man. So there's nothing wrong with swindling people, as long as they're willing to be swindled?

Yeah, but this is different. This is sex. Precisely. The rules of common sense no longer apply. Then why do we call her a sucker?

I hope I've broken through the shell a little and at least opened up the possibility that there might be something inconsistent in this kind of sex. Even President Clinton said he wasn't having sexual relations with her; she was having them with him, but after all, he wasn't touching her sexual organs. The mouth isn't really a sexual organ. We laugh scornfully, but isn't there a sense in which he was right? Interestingly, Monica seemed to agree with him; she told Linda Tripp that "having sex" only meant sexual intercourse--but her definition would exclude homosexuals from ever being able to have sex, wouldn't it? Hm.

It seems, therefore, that a little investigation is in order. Let me approach it, however, through other acts of ours that aren't sex, since sex is so emotionally charged. When is an act inconsistent with itself in its exercise?

Take lying. When you lie, you are communicating as a fact to someone what you think is not a fact. Put in that way, the contradiction is obvious. The fact that the person (who might have a right to know the truth) is deceived is an additional evil connected with the act; but even if it doesn't happen, there's no way you can make the act of lying consistent with itself as an act of factual communication. It's pretty hard to escape this, which is why it's so universally held that lying is wrong.

But there are some things that are useful to notice here. First of all, there's nothing wrong with not communicating facts to someone (unless, of course, he has a right to know the facts from you); so not telling the truth (not talking at all) is not the same as lying. You don't have to tell the truth; you just have to avoid telling the opposite of what you think the truth is.

Secondly, there's nothing wrong with stringing words together that communicate nothing at all. 'Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. (All right all right, I know that Humpty Dumpty gave that a meaning; but who's to say that he knew what the real story was? He's just an egg.) You're not exercising your ability to speak for any particular function it has; but it's not contradicting any function either. The same happens when you run on a treadmill and get nowhere.

Thirdly, it doesn't matter how you do the communicating, whether "naturally" by speaking, or by the extremely artificial, sophisticated method I am now using to you, where my fingers type words into my computer, which then translates all of this into magnetic impulses, which find their way somehow to a printer, and you finally "hear" what I am saying with your eyes. So the moral issue is not what is "natural" or "unnatural" in the "back-to-nature" sense of the term; it's what is consistent or inconsistent with the reality involved.

Fourthly, note that a lie is consistent with the speaker in many ways: it is consistent with his vocal cords, it is consistent with the language it is spoken in (supposing he hasn't made any grammatical mistakes), it is consistent with his purpose in gaining the advantage he is seeking with the lie (in fact, it might be the only way to gain that purpose). It's only inconsistent with this one aspect of the act. So then, whether it's in proper English, whether it's using proper diction, whether it gets him what he wants or not, it's still the communication of a non-fact as if it were a fact, and that one inconsistency makes it wrong--just as the one little inconsistency that the drink you lovingly gave your rich uncle contained arsenic made giving it to him wrong.

So an act is morally wrong if it contradicts any aspect of itself, whether it fulfills all the rest or not. And we know this. It's only the deconstructionists, who say that the only function of speech is to get people to do things, who can say that lying is okay; since for them the truth is that there's no such thing as truth, only manipulation. But try lying to them and see what their reaction is. They know.

(I suppose I should point out that you can lie by saying what is factually true, if you do so in such a way that your manner of saying it communicates the opposite. For instance, suppose Mr. Clinton had said to a reporter, "Of course I had sex with that woman! Do I look like the kind of person who would seduce a subordinate?" The irony of the tone would communicate the opposite of what the words say. Also, of course, what is legally a lie--perjury--has its own special definition; but it's because of "lying-while-saying-what-is-true" that the actual deposition was required in Mr. Clinton's case, and not just the transcript. You had to hear the tone of voice and so on to know what he was trying to communicate.)

One final point before we leave lying. I said above that in a given situation, a lie might be the only way to achieve what you want to achieve. Let me add that not to lie in such a situation might be disastrous. For instance, if President had Clinton admitted that he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, he'd have lost Paula Jones's lawsuit.

That, however, doesn't make the lie right. It's still inconsistent with yourself as a factual communicator. All it says is that it can be good to do wrong, as I mentioned at the end of interlude after the Second New Commandment. And, as I said there, I'll handle this at the very end of the book. All I want to stress now is that the fact that something is advantageous (and even that not to do it might be disastrous) doesn't make it right. What's consistent is consistent, and what's inconsistent is inconsistent, whether it's to your advantage or not.

Okay, that's one act and how it can be inconsistent. But now let's look at an act that has two different functions, and see how consistency and inconsistency apply to it. Can you use the act for one of its functions and not the other? It depends. As I'll try to show, you can't do this if it means contradicting the other function.

Let's take the act that used to be called the vice of gluttony, and--now that we've grown out of terms like "virtue" and "vice"--it's the "disease" called bulimia. A person eats and then throws up (or purges) so he doesn't gain weight, and can eat some more.

Now, irrespective of the long-term effect this has on the digestive system, it's analogous to a lie, isn't it? You're eating, but eating has two functions: gratifying your taste sensation and assimilation of food. (Let's forget about a "hierarchy of purposes" here, because moral wrongness consists--as I said above--in contradicting any aspect of an act in exercising it, not just in contradicting the "most important" one.) So you eat as if eating had only the function of gratifying your taste, and you deliberately thwart the other function it has, and in this respect, you prevent it from doing what it does. True, the food does taste the same whether you throw up afterward or not; but eating isn't just the gratification of taste--and you know this, or you wouldn't throw up so that you couldn't digest the food. So what you're saying by doing this is, in effect "Eating is only for the taste," while your act of throwing up shows that you recognize that it's also for nutrition, and therefore not only for the taste.

However, analogous to talking nonsense as opposed to lying, notice that there's nothing wrong with eating things that have no food value and taste good, like some of these diet foods that are for practical purposes flavored cellulose that can't be digested.

What's the difference? In both cases, you're eating and gaining no nutrition from it. The difference is that the act in the second case is all that it is; it's just that it doesn't have anything to act on. Eating never digests all of the food that's taken in; in fact, one of the facets of digestion is that the body accepts what's assimilable and rejects what's not. In this second case, it turns out that all of what's taken in is the kind of stuff that the act rejects. So the act is acting consistently with itself.

But in the first case, you're taking in what can be assimilated, and what the act of digestion will assimilate, and you're preventing it from doing what it does--as if eating were nothing but tickling your taste buds.

Notice also that there's nothing wrong with skipping a meal if you want to. In fact, if you're obese and you want to lose weight, but can't resist eating because your hunger drive is hyperactive, you can take a pill to suppress your appetite so that you don't eat so often. There's nothing wrong with "technologically" suppressing the act if it means not exercising it--any more than there's anything wrong with sticking your fingers in your ears so that you can't hear something you don't want to hear. In this case, you haven't tried to exercise the act as if it wasn't what it is; you haven't exercised it at all. You could even have a doctor put a balloon in your stomach so that you feel full when you've eaten only a little; because in that case, the act is doing what it does (digesting what you eat); it's just that you take in less.

Oh, for heaven's sake! What difference does it make? Only the difference between a lie and the truth, that's all. It's hypocrisy to pretend that eating has nothing to do with digestion when you know that it does, and to try to make it what it isn't. If you will, it's the equivalent of the sex-change operation, where the man pretends he's a woman because he's had a hole cut in him.

Two final points: First, there's nothing wrong with eating something just because it tastes good, and not caring whether it's nourishing or not, as long as it's not something that will make you sick. You don't have to want all of the functions of the act. The act is still what it is irrespective of your intention in performing it. (I hasten to add that if your intention is evil--such as eating so that your companion will also eat the poisoned food you have set before him--then the situation, of course, contains an evil in addition to the act itself.)

In fact, secondly, you don't have to want any of the functions of the act; you can eat something that doesn't taste good, and that you don't need for nourishment, as when you eat the first cupcake your daughter burned--I mean baked. What isn't charred can be digested, even if you don't need it, and it does taste good as a first effort (remember, values and goodness are subjective, not objective); and so, while you're not performing the act for either of its "natural purposes," so to speak, you're not contradicting any aspect of it, any more than when you use your ears to hold up your glasses, which has nothing to do with hearing. That should be obvious. You're only being immoral if you deny that the act is what it is (you want to pretend that the act doesn't do what it does), not if you don't care what it does.

All right, then, with that out of the way, let's see how all this applies to sex. The sex act obviously has three aspects to it: (1) it produces a very strong sensation, which most people find quite pleasurable; (2) it expresses and causes love for another person, or at the very least involves another person (even people who masturbate have difficulty succeeding unless they fantasize about another person); and (3) it is a child-producing kind of act.

This third point needs comment. It is obvious that human sex is not simply "for" reproduction, because if it were, then either every act would be reproductive (and it isn't; the woman is fertile only one or two days out of a month, and sperm can live in her only a week or so), or (like other animals) we would feel no urge to perform the act during the woman's infertile times. Let's be honest here.

But let's really be honest. That doesn't mean that the act isn't a reproductive kind of act. Whenever the act is carried to completion, the ejaculation of sperm indicates that there's this reproductive dimension to it--because what other sense does this aspect have? It's not food, as I said; it is the male component of fertilization. There are analogous things that happen in the woman, but they're not obvious. So, even though the act doesn't always reproduce, it's always a reproductive kind of act. (Go back to eating. Even though eating doesn't always in fact nourish you--depending on what you eat--it's always a nutritive kind of act. That's what I meant.)

Okay, then, what does this imply? First of all, on the first aspect, it's perfectly all right if you don't like sex. Most people do, but the sensation doesn't have to be categorized as "pleasure," if you find it unpleasant. You are not being "inhuman" if you don't like sex any more than you're weird if you don't like chocolate.

Let me stress this a bit. We've been so bombarded with the Fourth New Commandment and the idea that the sex drive is what you are "really all about"--especially as a man or woman--that there are lots of people who feel guilty because sex just doesn't interest them all that much.

But it's a need of nature, isn't it? Sure, but so is urination. Do you feel guilty because you don't regard the relief in urinating to be a fun experience, and because you're not constantly looking forward to your next trip to the bathroom? And as to its being a "need" of nature, it is not necessary to the health or fitness of the individual organism, however necessary it may be for the continuation of the species. If you don't contribute to the population of the world, you don't need to worry; there will be plenty to take up the slack. I repeat: There is nothing damaging to your physical or mental health in not ever having sex if you don't want to. (Of course, if you're married, and your partner wants it, then this would contradict the agreement you made when you married. But that's a different story.)

The point is that it's all right in itself not to engage in sex, just as it's all right not to talk if you don't want to. It's even all right, if you don't want to be bothered with sex, to take a pill or something that would suppress your libido and take away the urge; which would be like taking an appetite suppressant. There's nothing inconsistent here, because you're not performing the act inconsistently; you're not performing it at all.

Secondly, on the other side of this, it's all right to like sex, and there's nothing wrong with having sex just because it's fun--provided you don't contradict any other aspect of it--any more than there's anything wrong in eating a chocolate bar you don't need just because you like chocolate.

Thirdly, there's nothing wrong with taking Viagra or penile injections, or whatever, to assist you in having sex if you can't perform as you want to. In that case, the "technology" is just helping the act be what it is, as glasses help you to see better.

A propos of this, however, let me just remark that the sight of vast swarms of people my age storming the pharmacies for Viagra is a bit pathetic, don't you think? We've bought so thoroughly into this Fourth New Commandment that we think that if we don't perform the way we did when we were thirty, we've died (or we're sick with "sexual dysfunction"). I'm not trying to say that there's anything immoral about using these aids--and I can testify that young peoples' idea that the desire for sex dies at age forty is a lot of bunk. At the same time, there's a great deal to be said for acting your age; and not having to be distracted by insistent sexual promptings is a big help in doing things like thinking.

Fourthly, there's nothing wrong with performing the act for some other reason than one of its natural aspects--which is like eating your daughter's first cupcake solely in order to please her. Suppose you and your wife are both eighty, and in general the act is just too much of a nuisance any more. But it's your anniversary, and even though neither of you feel particularly sexy, you decide to have sex just to celebrate it. The act isn't terribly satisfying to either of you, and since this is the case on both sides, you're not "giving yourself" to your beloved (in the sense of giving pleasure), nor is the act in fact reproductive any more. But it doesn't contradict any one of its functions.

Well then, anything goes, right? Wrong. Let's first consider cases where one of the functions is directly contradicted in order to exercise the act for one of the other functions.

First under this category would come rape. It is not consistent with the act of sex as involving another person (expressing love) to have sex with that person against her will even in order to have a baby by her. This is one of the fallacies of the "hierarchy of purposes" views of sex, which would seem logically to permit rape in this case--though I hasten to say I know of no ethician who has ever said so. This would apply even to a man who is married to the woman. The end doesn't justify the means. You never have a right to force a person against her will, no matter how noble your purpose. (I say "her" because it's a little hard to imagine a woman raping a man to have a baby by him--though of course there are ways it can be accomplished.)

Second, however, it is not wrong to have sex with your partner when the other person is not particularly interested in having sex, but is not unwilling. Here, the act is not an act of love, because you aren't giving the other person any particular satisfaction; but you aren't contradicting the act as the kind of thing that expresses love for (recognizes the personhood of) the other person. You're not going against her will, even though she's not eager.

Notice, though, that the act becomes more an act of love when it is done more for the sake of the other person's satisfaction than your own. There's nothing wrong with it if you do it just for your own satisfaction, any more than eating candy just for the taste contradicts it as nourishment; it's just that positively speaking there's nothing loving about your intention. But the act in fact gives the sensation (which is in itself satisfying) to the other person; and so it is still a loving kind of act.

The ideal of the sexual act in this respect, of course, is that each partner cares more about the satisfaction of the other than himself; and as each tries to satisfy the other as much as possible, each receives the maximum satisfaction. But generally, with most acts of most couples, one partner this time is more satisfied than the other; and sometimes one is not really satisfied at all. That's perfectly okay. After all, not every meal you eat has to be worthy of Escoffier. (You see how useful it was to use the analogy with eating?)

Third--here it comes--it's morally wrong to exercise the act of sex even as an act of love and deliberately thwart its reproductive dimension. Yes, contraception is wrong, for the same reason that bulimia is wrong, and for the same reason that rape in order to have a child is wrong. It doesn't matter what kind of contraceptive you use, whether chemical or mechanical, or whatever. The point is that you want to prevent a reproductive act from being reproductive when it's reproductive, and that's inconsistent.

That is, you only use a contraceptive when you recognize that the act you want to perform might actually result in a child, and you don't want it to do what it does. What I mean is, supposing you had a contraceptive pill that you didn't have to take every day of the month, but would prevent conception if taken within three hours of the act, and then would wear off (so that you'd have to take it again if you wanted to have sex without a child from the next act). Now, would you take it during menstruation, when you can't have a child anyway? Of course not. You'd only take it when you knew that it was likely that a child would result because this is what the act does, and you didn't want that to happen, but you wanted to perform the act anyway.

Sure, the contracepting act is an act of love, and it's a pleasurable act; you haven't changed those aspects of it, just as lying is consistent with grammar and diction. But you try to perform it pretending that it's not reproductive, and it's also reproductive. And you know this, because you take steps to block its reproductiveness.

Put it this way: When the contraceptive fails, the act succeeds.

Oh, puh-leeze! What are we supposed to do, fill the world with our kids? No. In fact, you have a positive obligation not to have any more children than you foresee that you can bring up decently (obviously, because to cause to exist a human-being-that-can't-live-a-human-life is a contradiction). Then we don't have sex until menopause, right?

No. And this is the fourth point on this heading. It is not wrong to have sex during an infertile time of the month. As I said, sex is not a reproducing act, but a reproductive kind of act. You are not contradicting what it is when you have sex during an infertile time, any more than you contradict it by having sex when you don't particularly feel like it but your partner does. You don't have to want a child from the act; in fact, it is quite legitimate to perform the act and not want a child to result from it, if you can't afford the child. In having sex during an infertile period, the act is the same as the act during a fertile period; it is just that it can't in fact result in a child now. This is like eating something with no food value. But contraception is like eating and throwing up.

Remember, I'm only being logical here. Think it through.

And it's possible to be accurate, by using temperature and cervical secretions, and know when the woman is fertile, and so to know with accuracy what times of the month sex will be infertile and when it won't. And, if you can't have a child, then you can permit the incompleteness of the acts, and the fact that they're not as satisfying physically as acts during the fertile time, so that you can enjoy what's good about the acts without doing something that pretends they're not what they are. Because at these times, the acts in themselves are only satisfying and love-expressing. Sex is not fully itself without the child; but that doesn't mean that it's worthless without it.

Oh, come on! When you're doing this, you don't want to have a child, right? And so it's the same thing as using a contraceptive. Sorry, it won't work. Is it the same thing to walk to Los Angeles as it is to fly there, just because you get to the same place? Is it the same thing to wait for your rich uncle to die so you can get the inheritance as it is to lace his evening chocolate with arsenic?

Periodic abstinence recognizes what sex is, and is consistent with what sex is. Contraception is dishonest about what sex is. There's the difference. True, lying is more efficient at getting what you want than telling the truth; ask President Clinton. But a lie's a lie, for all that.

Let me leave you to mull over (fume over?) that, and move on to other forms of non-conceptive sex, like what President Clinton and Monica did.

You could argue that they weren't thwarting the reproductive dimension of the act in engaging in oral sex, because they didn't do anything to prevent the act from reproducing; it's just that the mouth is "infertile," so to speak. So how is this different from having missionary sex at an infertile time of the month?

The answer, of course, is that this kind of sexual act can't be construed to have anything to do with reproduction; it's not a reproductive kind of thing when engaged in in this way. The ejaculation of sperm makes no sense whatever in the mouth or rectum or anywhere else. Not to mention, as I said, that this kind of sexual activity satisfies the sexual desires of only one of the parties, and the other is a sucker. So it's wrong on two counts.

I might add that anal sex is also damaging. As Magic Johnson said in his book on AIDS, you have to use a condom every time in anal sex, because it's almost bound to cause bleeding, even if the bleeding isn't visible. The rectum was not built like the vagina, to have something pushed into it; its tissues are delicate. To pretend that this is a sexual act, even if both parties find pleasure in it, is to show how far we've come in blinding ourselves to what the facts are.

But that means that homosexuals can't have sex! Right. At least, they can't have consistent sex; and since this is (to a straight person, who doesn't have a powerful emotion clouding his vision) pretty inescapable, there's no real hope that homosexual sex will in the long run be regarded as "the same kind of thing" as straight sex, and just a different version of it. It didn't even get regarded that way in ancient Greece, where it was accepted for quite a while.

But you can't say that! What are they supposed to do? Wait a minute now. It doesn't follow from the fact that you have an urge, even if it's innate (which is problematic, but let's concede it), that you have a right to act on it. Jeffrey Dahmer simply cannot allow himself to satisfy his sexual desire to kill people and have sex with the corpses, and it doesn't matter where the desire came from. Pedophiles can't allow themselves to satisfy the sexual urge they didn't choose to have by having sex with children--and it doesn't matter how strong the urge is or how they got it. We know this.

Two points here. First, there's is nothing wrong with things like oral sex a married couple does to each other by way of foreplay (as long as one partner is not disgusted by it--which would violate the love-aspect--and as long as no physical damage is done). This sort of thing can be part of the complete act. What I'm talking about here is treating this part as if it were all that the act is.

Secondly, there's nothing wrong with homosexuals expressing affection for each other, holding hands, kissing, and so on; because they do have affection for each other. Unfortunately, to express this affection by an act of sexual "intercourse" that is inconsistent is to be dishonest about what the act is. I don't see how you can get around this.

And note that if you say that this kind of thing is okay, then you've got no logical grounds for saying that there's anything inconsistent about pedophilia, with having sex with a horse (as long as she doesn't object), or with the kind of "sex" that Robert Mapplethorpe so glossily depicted, in which a man's arm is up another's rectum to the elbow, or one is urinating into another's mouth. This is sex?

I should also point out that it's not dishonest, and is perfectly all right morally, for a homosexual to marry a person of the other sex and have sex with her. It might feel "unnatural" to him; but this is the equivalent of saying that there's nothing wrong with eating olives even though they taste bad to you. The act in fact is consistent with itself, and (if he can perform it) he gets some satisfaction (at least the satisfaction of relief) from it; and as long as his partner knows the situation and is willing to put up with the fact that the act is not fully itself, there is nothing wrong with it.

But the homosexual was born that way; it's his nature! Now wait just a second. Suppose that's true (as I say, it's problematic). Some blind people were born that way too, and so are some cripples. Sure, it's the "nature" of a blind person not to see, and of a cripple to limp, but that doesn't mean that the "nature" is not defective. If we find genetic defects in just about every other aspect of human life, why should we not find people who are defective sexually? This implies no moral overtones. There's nothing immoral about being homosexual (i.e. having homosexual desires), any more than there's anything morally wrong with being blind. What is morally wrong is to act on these desires, as if the desire indicated the "true self." It doesn't, as I indicated. (We've got so screwed up on this that I heard someone who worked with the deaf say that deafness is as "normal" as hearing, and it would be wrong to try to cure someone's deafness.)

Finally, let me say a couple of other things that logically follow but will also make you angry. First Artificial insemination and all its variants to have a baby is also wrong because it pretends that the act (i.e. the act of inseminating the woman) is only reproductive and has no other dimension. That is, the doctor certainly doesn't want to arouse the woman he's impregnating, though he's manipulating her sexual organs for the purpose of getting her pregnant; still less does he want her to be sexually attracted to him. So the act is not supposed to be pleasurable or to express mutual love in the couple performing it; it's purely and simply reproductive and nothing else. This is sex?

I should also point out here that, since a child has the right to be reared, and this right is a right against those who caused him to exist, then there is a confusion in who is the "causer" here. Is it the sperm donor, the doctor, or the husband of the woman? The child can have three "fathers," but no one of them is the father who can be singled out to have, whether he "accepts" it or not, the responsibility to care for him. That's an additional evil often connected with the act.

If you can't have a child of your own, then this is unfortunate; but there are plenty of children whose parents either can't or won't rear them. You can do a service to them by rearing these orphans.

Secondly, if you've followed me this far, you know I'm going to say that masturbation is morally wrong. I'll grant that it does no physical damage, but obviously it can't be construed to have anything to do with love or with reproduction. Even in what is now taught as "outercourse," where, as I understand it, two people watch each other masturbate, the act is not an act of love, whether or not the people who are doing this love each other.

I told you you wouldn't like this. I don't like it any more than you do. But if you believe there are such things as facts, then I don't see how you can escape the conclusions I've come to.